The Cahokia (Ill.) Community Unit School District 187 voted (minutes) last week to close a few school buildings in order to save music, athletics, physical education, and a few teachers’ jobs, all of which would have been cut without the closures, the Belleville News-Democrat reports.
The district is hoping the closures will save part of the district’s projected deficit for 2013-14, $1.5 million. The deficit comes from declining enrollment, which cuts the funds the district receives from the state, from a loss in property tax revenue, and from raises that are part of multi-year union contracts.
If the state provides the same level of funding as it has in the past (89% of the formula), the district will close the high school’s Estelle Sauget Freshman Academy and the Jerome Early Childhood Center. The freshmen center holds about 250 students, who would simply attend classes in their freshman year at the high school and increase the enrollment in that building from about 750 to 1,000.
The News-Democrat’s editors wrote that their “fear is that education is being shortchanged for the sake of protecting sports and other extracurriculars”: “It’s clear that sports and other extracurriculars are a priority for many parents and students in the district. But reading, math, science and history should be the real priorities.”
Based on recent research, we respectfully disagree with the News-Democrat. The opinion that reading and math should be placed above music and athletics is held by people who want to tear down our public schools so they can replace them with charter schools, including online-only charter schools.
As we will show, the ultimate endgame in a system that has as its first move that of making public schools less attractive and engaging for students is the rise of charter schools in their place. Stripping schools to the core subjects in Cahokia would still be a few steps away from the end if school leaders followed the advice of the newspaper’s editors, but the editors’ intentions show when they advise the schools to sacrifice the fine arts and athletics in order to bolster reading and math.
“I would rather close some facilities and continue to offer programs to teach rather than take programs from kids to come up with the money,” the paper quoted Superintendent of Schools Art Ryan as saying.
So would we. Education is not in a building, but rather, it is in our hearts and in the nature of the interactions between teachers and students. How can we possibly justify closing 40 or 50 schools in Chicago this year if the actual buildings mattered? The point is, kids don’t really care about buildings that are a little crowded; they do care about the programs offered at the school. These are the things—not math and reading—that lead kids to want to go to school in the first place and cause families to want to send their kids to a given school.
To remove the extras of education, however off-target you may believe, in your great wisdom, they are, is to make the school less desirable for students and therefore for their families. They’ll move away from the district to attend schools that serve their needs, enrollment will drop further, less funding will flow into the district on a per-pupil basis, and other schools in the district will have to close. This isn’t what we want.
Look at the outcry over threatened cuts to extracurricular and arts programs in Philadelphia’s schools! Yes, nurses, guidance counselors, teachers’ assistants, and assistant principals are also being cut, a situation that is also causing no less a stir than cuts to arts and sports. But symphony orchestras are writing letters to school superintendents, and other community members are engaging in what we hope will be constructive dialog with school officials over the quality of education. This is what educators have been dreaming about for decades, and it has taken a crisis to make it happen. But it’s happening.
We would wish the same engagement level for Cahokia’s schools—and from more than the local newspaper—if such radical cuts were necessary. But they’re not. Mr Ryan has found a way to keep kids interested in going to school. If we can keep them in school, we have a much better chance of helping them learn math, reading, science, and social studies, which the News-Democrat’s editors say should be a priority, than if they aren’t in school because the school has nothing to offer them to keep their interest.